From munera pulveris Note 1 pp.

50-51: The disputes which exist respecting the real nature of money arise more from the disputants examining its functions on different sides, than from any real dissent in their opinions. All money, properly so called, is an acknowledgment of debt ; but as such, it may either be considered to represent the labour and property of the creditor, or the idleness and penury of the debtor. The intricacy of the question has been much increased by the (hitherto necessary) use of marketable commodities, such as gold, silver, salt, shells, etc., to give intrinsic value or security to currency ; but the final and best definition of money is that it is a documentary promise ratified and guaranteed by the nation to give or find a certain quantity of labour on demand. A man's labour for a day is a better standard of value than a measure of any produce, because no produce ever maintains a consistent rate of productibility.
p. 53: Any given accumulation of commercial
wealth may be indicative, on the one hand, of faithful industries, progressive energies, and productive
ingenuities or, on the other, it may be indicative of mortal luxury, merciless tyranny,
:

ruinous chicane. Some treasures are heavy with human tears, as an ill-stored harvest with untimely rain and some gold is brighter in sunshine than it is in substance.
;

p. 55: As I said a few pages back ( 30), the money power

is

always

imperfect and doubtful; there are many things which cannot be reached with it, others which

cannot be retained by

it.

Many joys may be

given to men which cannot be bought for gold,

and many fidelities found in them which cannot be rewarded with it. Yes but not so trite, I wish it were, that in this moral power, quite inscrutable and immeasurable though it be, there is a monetary value just as real as that represented by more ponderous
p. 55:
:

it is

currencies.

A man's hand may be full of invisible

wave of it, or the grasp, shall

gold, and the

do more than another's with a shower of bullion.

This invisible gold, also, does not necessarily diminish in spending. Political economists will do well some day to take heed of it, though they cannot take measure.
p. 56- 57: Since the essence of wealth consists men, will it not follow that the

in power over

nobler and the more in number the persons are over

whom

it has

power, the greater the wealth

Perhaps it may even appear, after some consideration,

that the persons themselves are the wealth that these pieces of gold with which we are in the habit of guiding them, are, in fact, nothing more than a kind of Byzantine harness

or trappings, very glittering and beautiful in barbaric sight, wherewith we bridle the creatures but that if these same living creatures could be

guided without the fretting and jingling of the Byzants in their mouths and ears, they might themselves be more valuable than their bridles. In fact, it may be discovered that the true veins of wealth are purple and not in Rock, but in FlesE^perhaps even that the fanal outcome and consummation of all wealth is in the producing
as many as possible full-breathed, bright-eyed,

and

happy-hearted human creatures. Our modern wealth, I think, has rather a tendency the other

way most political economists appearing to

;

consider multitudes of human creatures not

THE VEINS OF 57 conducive to wealth, or at best conducive to it only by remaining in a dim-eyed and narrowchested
II.

WEALTH

state of being.